mardi 25 juillet 2017

Alternate History: If the Confederacy Had Won

In thinking about the "states' rights" claims about the Confederacy, I wonder, were they really in support? I mean, we have the real life attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and the fact that they threatened to secede over the fact that Delaware tried to get around it. But let's take it a bit more: Suppose the Confederacy had won?

Would they have imposed the CSA constitution on the union? If I remember right, the CSA constitution specifically prohibited states from outlawing slavery. Would that apply to the rest of the union, then?

I contend the south was not in any way in favor of states' rights, because if it were up to them, they would have insisted that all that states be slave states. They only adopted a "states' rights" stance to protect their right to keep slavery. I don't think for a second that, had they the power, they would have forced all states to participate. They actually opposed the states' rights guaranteed by the US Constitution, so when they got their chance to write their own, they took that part out.